Monday, February 16, 2015

Drew Reviews: Komodo

The Short Version: The story of
an ordinary woman, plucked from her (our?) plane of existence by
transdimensional beings kind of like angels to do special-ops type work for
them that might just bring about
the end of the multiverse. Also there are ghost frogs and transdimensional
komodos and a whole host of other weird things.

The Review: Well, fuck.

I've been a fan of
Jeff's for a long time but I had no idea just how weird he could get until now.
And I say this having read his Ambergris trilogy, full of mushroom-people and
squid festivals, as well as the Area X trilogy, with its brightness and tunnel-that's-a-tower and mice-washing
- I mean, I knew he was weird. But this takes the cake, in the best possible
way.

This novella -
almost more of an individual short story, really - will take you maybe less
than a half hour to read, but it almost demands that you turn around and start
reading it again. Not that I think you'll understand it any better,
necessarily, but you might glean some interesting secondary details. See, our
narrator is a woman recounting what seems to be a weird children's story at
first. Or, well, she's talking to a child at least and the things she's
making up are strange enough and even a little silly... but, no, they're real.
Whatever's going on is really going on - and as the story goes on, it's either
that the narrator stops trying to make analogies or we, the reader, have gotten
used to the ones that are being made and so you find yourself in short order
nodding away at the appearance of a dead rotting bear that is in fact not dead
nor is it actually a bear, rather another strange transdimensional creature,
described as "something ancient from the future, a refutation of
everything you think you know about physics."

I mean, okay. Sure.
You will know better than I whether or not you're the sort of reader who can
get on board with this sort of thing - I, blissfully and happily, happen to be
one of those.
Although it wasn't always that way. There was a time when I might've looked at
the weirdness of this story (which actually masks a pretty ordinary
operative-gone-rogue plot, in some ways) and been completely turned off. But
the thing is, the thing that makes Jeff's work (and the work of the Miévilles
and Ciscos of the world) worthy is that it doesn't wear its weirdness on its
sleeve. It isn't trying to show off, to preen and primp and do acrobatics with
language in order to make you think that you must not be worthy if you can't
understand it. No, it's just really honest and open and telling a good story.
If that story happens to deal with the multiverse and an "angel"
called Gabriel and, briefly, ghost whales... well, okay. As long as you're
telling me a story, you can put in whatever you want. I'll be there. And this
is Jeff's gift: he can make the weirdest thing you could possibly imagine
somehow, well, imaginable. The descriptions in his story (of that bear, of the
"angels", of the many other weird creatures and species and things
that pop up) quite often don't make a lick of standard sense and if you try too
hard to imagine them, you might pass out. But the ability to ride Jeff's
delightful prose into a sort of liminal craziness allows you to imagine without
directly imaging, if that makes sense - saving your sanity while still creating
for you the enjoyable experience of imagining something as you read.

I could go on about
this at length, but it's probably faster for you to just go find the story and
read it. That is, if you don't mind getting a little (read: a lot) weird.

Rating: 5 out of 5. A blast. Many many times
weirder than anything in the Ambergris or Area X trilogies, in the best
possible way. If you're a fan of VanderMeer, you ought to check this out and
see just how wild the man's imagination can get. If you aren't a fan of
VanderMeer yet, go read City of Saints
and Madmen or Annihilation and get a little taste of what's to
come. Jumping into the deep end is dangerous, for you and for others - but I
promise the water is fine either way. Just look out for the...

Drew Broussard reads, a lot. When not doing that, he's writing stories or playing music or acting or producing or coming up with other ways to make trouble. He also has a day job at The Public Theater in New York City.

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I have been buried beneath small press and self-published review copies since 2009. My passion for supporting the small press and self publishing communities has driven me out into the world wide web to demonstrate alternative ways to spread the word about amazing publishers, authors, and novels you might never had heard of. Feeding your reading addiction, one book at a time.